


Finding You

by Starshaker



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, Getting to Know Each Other, Kyber Crystals, Loneliness, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 07:19:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15286566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starshaker/pseuds/Starshaker
Summary: Kylo has been banished in isolation until he learns Snoke’s final lessons; to stop feeling when his senses are naturally more attuned to the feelings of the force and others. Hux finds a way to reach him, and they find a way to reach out to each other. Reluctantly, Hux and Kylo learn through each other's hopes and fears and when each are feeling most desperate they reach out to each other..





	Finding You

Hux would later claim he was desperate: that the need to find his next advantage over the rebellion and their force users drove him to Ren’s empty quarters on the very thin chance that there would be something of Ren’s study materials on a discarded datapad that must have sat there eighteen months at least. 

There was a cold twist in his gut that told him that though the whole ship was his to peruse should he wish, Ren’s room made him deeply uneasy. 

In truth there was little here of any interest. The bed was bare, the desk held a single standard-issue datapad which Hux had already hacked months ago. Ren was a decidedly boring person, only occupied by his spiritual obsessions. Darth Vader’s broken helmet was a relic when Hux had witnessed it being brought on board, now it lay in pieces in a tray of ashes. Dirt. Ren kept a tray of dirt on Hux’s otherwise immaculate ship. The sanitation department boasted higher standards than could be found in Ren’s chambers, despite their frequent dealings with excrement and medical’s offcasts.

Hux was about to turn around and return to his duties when the final drawer in the desk revealed a red crystal shard. He wondered briefly if this was kyber similar to that within Ren’s saber. The saber’s design certainly looked unstable enough to have bits break off at whim. Hux reached out a gloved hand and lifted the shard from the drawer. He almost expected it to burn hot like Ren’s saber, though if it had, he supposed Ren would not have left in in a standard drawer. 

There was something unsettling about the way it was just a crystal shard in his hand. Only as heavy as it looked, little more than a jagged coloured pebble. Unassuming, despite all the power and devastation it held in potential. 

Hux closed his fist around it. A sharp pain made him gasp and open out his hand. The edge of the kyber shard had cut clean through his gloves and into his palm. He dropped the shard into his other hand and pulled his torn glove off with his teeth, hissing as the glove pulled at the edges of the cut. Blood stained the lining and the pair would have no further use. 

Still, bacta would heal the cut, another pair of gloves could be retrieved from his long term storage trunk and Ren’s infernal belongings could be left to rot. Perhaps he should have them thrown out of an airlock for good measure, there was little chance Ren would be returning to the Finalizer after so long. 

He moved to open the disposal and pulled his other glove off. The blood from the cut now dripped down his other hand and dripped across the kyber. The idea of defacing the sacred rock drew out a smile from Hux and he smeared the blood across the flat face of the shard. He could only imagine how distasteful Kylo would find it.

As it moved in his palm the low light made it almost appear to pulse once, twice. 

Hux wrapped the shard in his gloves and turned to the disposal. Then he paused. The crystal might yet be useful, in a new weapons prototype perhaps. Spare materials were hard to come by and simulations couldn’t always calculate appropriately. He wrapped the gloves around each other and pocketed them both. There was nothing else of interest in Ren’s quarters unless there was some hidden compartment, and Ren didn’t seem the type to do anything with subtlety. 

A medical droid scanned his cut, cleaned and sterilized it and issued him with a tube of bacta to be used as and when he felt it necessary. The cut would disrupt his ability to type and draw up blueprints, but only for the next twelve hours while the bacta knit the skin back together. Hux took another walk of the bridge and then retired to his quarters. If he was going to be inconvenienced then he might as well take the rare opportunity and sleep through it. 

As he undressed he lifted his gloves from his overcoat pocket and set them on his desk at his bedside. The kyber shard looked as clean as when he’d lifted it from Ren’s desk drawer. The gloves must have absorbed the blood, soaked too far into the leather to be noticeable. He’d decide how he wanted to work with it tomorrow. He pulled on a standard-issue nightshirt and turned off the lights. Sleep never usually came easily for him. Too much to control, too much that needed his attention. Still, he shut his eyes and waited for sleep to take him out.

It did not take him gently. He startled awake and reached for his chrono.

Five minutes. He’sd slept for five minutes and woken in a cold sweat. He huffed and rolled onto his side facing the wall. Within seconds he was back in the place of nightmares. Cold and dark. Alone. Seemingly floating in some great abyss.

“ _Help me. Please. Somebody_.”

It took Hux a moment longer than it should have done to realise the words were not his own. The fear was in his own gut. The darkness stretched out from him. The feeling of everything being just out of reach. 

“ _Who’s there? Please. Someone, please_.”

“What is this place?” Hux asked.

“ _Nothing_ ,” a voice said. It was shortly followed by a hollow laugh: “ _Why don’t you scream to test it out_?” A broken sob turned to a cry and not even an echo came back through the darkness. The anguish, the pain; Hux found it familiar.

“Ren?”

“ _No. Not you. Not you_ -” 

Hux woke in much the same way as he had before: in a cold sweat and without enough air in his lungs. It took at least thirty seconds of sitting hunched over the side of the bed, breathing as deeply as he could, to fill his lungs and make the ache in his bones relent. Then he reached for his chrono again. Hours had passed, and it was time Hux went back to work.

He spent no longer than two minutes in the fresher. The confined space felt as prison-like as his nightmares, as unsettling as Ren’s room. Hux mentally scolded himself. An empty chamber would not torture him any more than his own mind could. 

As Hux dressed, his eyes kept returning to the crystal. Once he’d pulled on his boots and stood to check himself in the mirror he hesitated before leaving. He walked over to the desk and looked down with disdain. 

“Not even on my ship and you continue to threaten my sanity,” Hux muttered as he picked up the shard, careful not to catch himself again on its edges, and pocketed it. He could divert down to engineering or scientific development later to find if they had a use for it. The sooner it was ground down into dust the better.

\--------

Hux suspected that the kyber was having something to do with his odd dreams and Ren-focused thoughts. There was no other reason for it. He’d spent an hour walking the length of his ship; he passed the weapons section, the engineers, the waste disposal, each time waiting for the moment when he could open the door and hand over the crystal for a better use - and each time he nodded to the occupants of the room and carried on down the corridor, his pace never faltering.

Last of all he walked into the storerooms. The Officers kept a few belongings here and despite standard privacy regulations Hux could access every one with the press of his thumb to the scanner. He could drop the kyber shard into Ren’s crates and be done with it. He stood in the section, looking down at Ren’s storage crate, and turned the kyber over in his hand. The dim lights gave the crystal a blood-red colour that seemed to darken as Hux stared at it.

Hux could feel himself sinking. Feelings and thoughts that were not his own curdled in his gut and left him feeling sickened. Failure and loss. Anger and self-loathing. He was born to be great and he was standing in his own way. The darkness should have been enough to sustain him and yet it felt suffocating.

The darkness was consuming his every sense. Like a babe in the womb or a creature within an egg before the universe had set its limitations, Hux could feel this place held potential, though for what he couldn’t decide.

“ _Master please_ ,” Kylo pleaded, “ _I need your guidance_ …”

“How long have you been here?” Hux asked, he felt Kylo’s sharp intake of breath. 

Moments passed in the emptiness before Kylo responded. “ _Hux_?”

“Not many other people regularly get stuck in hell with you, do they?” Hux asked. He tried to work out if there was anything around him to denote a direction.

“ _I’ve tried. I’ve tried to follow his instructions. I can’t feel the Force within me anymore, it’s path only flows out, like a red string pulled taut_.” The darkness filled Hux’s mind further as Ren spoke. Sharp pain cut across his mind and his lungs ached as if all the oxygen had burned up in an instant. But there was a light, a flash of an image and steady emotion available to his senses if he could resist the overwhelming urge to stop looking and struggle against the waves of pain that seemed to be coming from nothing at all.

“ _Hux_?”

“I can hear you,” Hux gasped and the knowledge of Ren being nearby felt steadying while his body felt as though it were being torn apart.

“ _Just now, or always_?” Kylo asked.

“I’m here now.”

“ _You’re not supposed to be_ ,” Kylo said. He sounded tentative, as if confused by his own statement.

“I’m getting that idea, yes,” Hux said through gritted teeth.

“ _It is clear that there is more to the darkness than any one man can see, and you are just a man_ ,” Kylo said.

“Yes. Thank you,” Hux said and tried to hold the conversation in the front of his mind to stop from losing his thoughts too deeply. “When did Snoke last speak with you?”

“ _He came to me when I was injured, in a vision. He said I would complete my training soon_.”

“Kylo, it’s been months,” Hux said and gasped as a ripple of sickness seemed to leave him without breathable air. 

“ _Knowledge needs time_.”

“I delivered you to Snoke nearly 17 months ago. How are you still alive?” Hux asked.

“ _The Force sustains me_ ,” Kylo said and something shoved Hux back. “ _You will die if you stay here_.”

“And you won’t?” Hux asked. He managed his balance like he was on a cliff edge, leaning back into what he hoped was safe ground above the precipice of the abyss.

“ _My outcome is known only to the Force, I will survive if I am strong enough_.”

“You’ll survive if you fight. If you escape,” Hux said, “you’ll survive if-”

“ _I’ll survive if I am worthy_ ,” Kylo said. “ _You shouldn’t BE here_!” Kylo’s sullen words pushed Hux back and within a blink he was staring at the walls of the Finalizer around him. The air filled his lungs as it always had and the ship hummed around him. After a few minutes his heart beat in its normal steady rhythm as though nothing had ever happened to have shaken him so painfully.

The best place for Ren was in some deep abyss, Hux thought. 

\--------

Hux shut his eyes tight as his hazy drunken perceptions turned his stomach. The fresher was helping with his migraine, and if he stayed still enough, his body would hold everything in its proper place. The drink. His stomach contents. The resistance on their galactic borders. 

He wished to be somewhere else a million light years from where he was.

Something in the universe granted him his request.

He searched for light in the darkness and found none. 

“ _What are you feeling_?” Kylo asked.

“Optimistic anticipation,” Hux deadpanned.

“ _What are you feeling_?” Kylo asked again and Hux felt something clouding his thoughts. His frustration peaked. He’d heard of Force users’ ability to influence emotions.

“What are you feeling, Kylo?” Hux snapped in reply. “Or have you reached that higher plane of enlightenment already?”

“ _Disgust. Disappointment_.”

“Towards?”

“ _None of your business_ ,” Kylo snapped. “ _You keep coming back, what do you want_?”

“Nothing I want can be found with you in this place,” Hux said.

“ _You were… upset_ ,” Kylo said.

“I was not,” Hux snapped. A light pressure against his forehead emanated warmth and the haze of the drink faded into it. Then the pressure lifted and with it all pretense of hazy thoughts.

“ _You only poison yourself when you have bad days. You were upset_.”

“I was irritated, with you, would you believe it,” Hux said and wished he could glare down whatever form Kylo had in this place. “And I was drinking, not poisoning myself.”

“ _Same thing. You pretend you don’t want to focus anymore, you pretend until you don’t have to anymore_.”

“It works for me just fine. Find your own coping mechanism.”

“ _I have you_ ,” Kylo said. His words wrenched a hole in Hux’s stomach where any remaining self possession fell through.

“Me?”

“ _When I feel like I am losing myself, I imagine you. I do what you would expect of me_ ,” Kylo said. “ _It’s getting harder_.”

“What is?” Hux asked.

“ _To tell the difference between you and when my mind tricks me into believing you’re here_ ,” Kylo said. “ _I’m better when you’re here, I’m worse when you’re not._ ”

Hux felt pity for this poor and powerful man trapped in whatever hell Snoke had conspired to keep him in. 

“Faith in people is often misplaced,” Hux told him. 

Hux felt a chill run down his spine as he’d done each time he’d stepped into the conference chamber alongside Ren and looked up at the flickering image of Snoke above them. He would never be scared. He would never back down again. If Ren were on his side, at his side, he’d never lose again. 

“You should know that I’m coming for you,” Hux said. If he were not talking into empty darkness then he might have thought he felt a hand close around his wrist.

“ _Snoke_ ,” Kylo said, his voice quiet, though the name echoed into the darkness and back to them as if the so-called Supreme Leader was indeed omniscient. 

“He’s left you, nearly two years ago.” 

“ _No_ ,” Kylo said. His voice was strained and Hux was sure his convictions could not hold up to more than another question or conflicting statement.

“You told me when he last came to you. There wasn’t a reason for you to lie about that.”

“ _He’s, he’s training me_ ,” Kylo said, his voice that of a child’s.

“He’s left you, a broken mess in a dark abyss. A black hole in some forgotten part of the universe. He won’t be coming back,” Hux said.

“ _LIAR_!”

Hux was thrown out of the darkness and found himself braced against the fresher wall. His knees were seconds from giving out as he lowered himself to the floor and shivered against the cool plating.

\--------

It was becoming more and more comforting to shut his eyes and be pulled to this other time and place. A darkness that could be anywhere in the galaxy. A darkness that held a reminder of what he needed to keep working towards. 

“I’m going to sit here for a while Ren, if you’re still here.”

“ _If I wasn’t still here, what would you do_?” Ren’s voice was quiet and close; Ren could be sat beside him shoulder to shoulder.

“I’d sit here all the same. I can’t really tell if you are here or not. Or where here is,” Hux said. That was, after all, why he was having so much trouble tracking Ren down. Only a feeling, and as much as he hated following unspecified, untested directions, it was all he had. 

“ _You’d stay_?” Kylo asked.

“Until I understood,” Hux said.

“ _Understand what_?”

“I think I need to understand you,” Hux said, and looked to where he imagined Ren’s voice was coming from. He wondered if his hair had grown into more of a tangled mess. If his skin was paler. 

“ _I don’t need to be understood_ ,” Ren said.

“I think I would like to all the same,” Hux said. A warmth covered his hand and his closed his fingers around it as if he might capture whatever was causing it. “Is that you? Or am I about to lose all function in my hand?”

The warmth faded to a single point, no bigger than a fingertip; it traced a circle around the back of his hand and trailed up his forearm before it vanished. Hux scowled. If Ren wanted to make fun of him it was his own fault for allowing him the opportunity.

The warmth returned, a large warm pressure at the back of his neck.Hux took a deep breath and felt it reach into the tension in his neck and shoulder muscles. 

“That is not helping me to concentrate.”

“ _I was always under the impression that you could concentrate through anything_ ,” Kylo said. “ _This is hardly the worst I could do to you_.”

“I would appreciate that even less.”

“ _Would you prefer it if I…_?” The warmth retracted and Hux shivered as he took stock of his senses again.

“You are a living dichotomy,” Hux said. A feeling of amusement and then frustration seemed to edge into his thoughts from an outside source. “You don’t even know yourself, do you?”

“ _I, I don’t think I’ve had the opportunity before_ ,” Kylo said. “ _Snoke isn’t here anymore, but I don’t know where I could go, what I can do_.”

“Do you know where I can find you?”

“ _You’re already coming in the right direction_ ,” Kylo said. “ _You’ll be here in a couple of weeks_.”

\--------

Hux climbed the steps to the viewing platform and looked out across the galaxy. They’d been on the same path for a month now and for the past few weeks they’d seen nothing but empty space. Most of his crew thought he had gone mad. There were no rebellion fighters on their trail, the rest of the First Order fleet were far behind them and Hux had given them no definitive answers. There had been no response when Hux had found himself in the darkness and he wondered whether he had indeed gone mad.

“Where are you, Ren?” Hux asked under his breath.

“ _I don’t know._ ”Ren’s voice seemed as if it were right beside him, or in his own head. Hux glanced around the room and found he was just as alone as he thought he was.

“When did you learn to do that?” Hux asked the empty room.

“ _It came to me when I needed it_ ,” Kylo said, his voice again in Hux’s mind. “ _I’ve found my way_.” A curl of warmth tightened around Hux’s chest.

““We’ve been through a lot, you and I. Despite what any of my previous statements may have implied, I would give quite a lot for you to be here again.” Hux tightened his grip around the railing and he stared off towards the swirl of a distant galaxy. “I’m going to find you.”

“ _Thank you, General_ ,” Kylo said, “ _Thank you, Hux_.”

Hux waited a minute or so as he traced the edge of the galaxy’s stars as they faded in a swirl of blue and purple.

“How are you, Ren?” Hux asked.

No reply came.

**Author's Note:**

> This was my submission to the 2017 Kylux anthology that sadly I never saw published. It may not look like it but I found this pretty tricky to write so I hope you've enjoyed reading. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think.


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